International Higher Education
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My Higher Education Career has been a global one, consolidated in my recent role as Pro Vice-Chancellor at Bournemouth University whereby I led the design, development and delivery of an ambitious cross institutional Global Engagement Plan with endorsement from the Board, staff, students and partners.
Some five years on, at the time of my departure, the institution had exceeded all its KPI targets and had the foundations for a University that is recognised worldwide for its footprint and brand of global engagement.
In this section you can find various collateral that captures the essence of the strategy we designed during my tenure and the impact this has generated over the years.
Business Schools & Management Education
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Business Schools are my first passion! I am a product of many and have been fortunate enough to lead one of the largest Faculties of Business, Law and Tourism in the South East of England at the University of Bedfordshire between 2012-2014.
I led the design, development and delivery of what I am told was a tenacious vision for the Faculty to be the leading practice based School of its time. This meant a complete flip in the way we viewed our programmes, staff and student experience and our learning, teaching and assessment philosophy. To build the foundations for this overhaul, we first built a top class academic management and executive team, rationalised department structures and ran a range of staff development programmes to ensure we embedded and embodied this new vision in the core fabric of our identity.
Nearly a decade on, I am proud to see that the legacy lives on as the School still has the same vision and continues to deliver on a practice led pathway. The flagship products incepted during my time continue to characterise the business school at Bedfordshire. I remain grateful to all in the senior management team who believed in this vision even beyond my tenure!
In this section you will find links to the vision we incepted as well as some cutting edge innovative projects like the Wall Art, Practice Weeks and a range of allied programmes of work.
Business School Strategy and Review
Global Talent Development
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Universities, I believe, are the foundations for human development. Of course we do cutting edge research, discover and disseminate new knowledge, tackling the global challenges that our societies face but at its core still is or should be the mission toward human development.
Over the course of my career, my work has aimed to further this mission through the intersection of research on skills development, graduate employability and pedagogic innovation.
A project that exemplifies my thinking and practice in this area of work in recent years is the Global Talent Programme at Bournemouth University. Research on this programme of work commenced in 2014 through successive funding support from the Higher Education Academy, and then the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The programme piloted with circa 200 students and over four years a significant proportion of our students enrolled and actively engaged on the programme with a cross section of academic and administrative staff supporting its further development.
This section showcases the Global Talent Programme as well as previous work I led in shaping the cross institutional student experience and graduate outcomes proposition at Bedfordshire University.
Developing Global Talent
Digital Learning
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My passion for shaping new models of education drove me to the world of EdTech Start ups a few years ago, allowing me to expand and enrich my expertise in International Higher Education from a digital perspective. I have since worked at two Ed Tech Start ups both of which are challenger institutions working at the forefront of digital innovation as technology first educational initiatives.
In this context, I joined as a founding team member at the world’s first social enterprise university (Nexford) registered in Washington D.C. Several notable achievements included contributing to successful fundraising ($7m) initiatives and helping establish the first subscription-based model of university education.
Next, as Chief Academic Officer and Founding CEO at Edvanza UK Ltd, I have built the company, team and product roadmap ground up, with a presence in Israel, India, Africa and the UK. This is a CareersTech product now housed within one of the largest private education providers in Europe.
Innovation Projects
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International Commencement Ceremonies
The comment stuck with me. It is true - why do we celebrate the departure of our students with such aplomb but not welcome them with the same sense of ceremony? In September of 2015, I decided to correct that and incepted the idea of a Commencement Ceremony targeting the new intake of international students for the year. The idea was to welcome all our international students to the UK, to Dorset, to Bournemouth University with the same sense of glamour, celebration and inspiration as the moment of graduation would be.
Catch the videos of some of our past ceremonies here! These events have transformed the students arrival experience and helped us make huge strides on our student experience surveys.